I am doing homework.

Really.

My dad gave me my office keys back yesterday.  Actually, they were never my keys to begin with, but he changed the locks and never gave me new keys.  Until yesterday, when I really needed to come down here and work, and had no keys.

I feel like a complete person again.

In all honesty, being here in the quietness of the office building on a Sunday, is odd. I’m using my laptop at Jeremy’s old desk(my dad told me this was the best hookup. I thought of sitting on Jeremy’s chair, and asked dubiouslly, “I’m not going to catch anything, right?”), and if I lean back for a second, if I am quiet and close my eyes, I can hear them.  See them. Feel them.

The vistages remain.  Yellow post-it notes still litter Jeremy’s desk; my cousin, like me, doodles excessively on post-it notes and leaves them lying around.  One of them, dated 09/02/04, is even in my handwriting…

When your education x-ray cannot see under my skin,
I won’t tell you a damn thing that I could not tell my friends.
Now roaming through this darkness,
I’m alive but I’m alone,
Part of me is fighting this but part of me is gone

I don’t remember the date, or what happened, or why I was sitting at Jeremy’s desk, but I remember that emotion.  Dave’s coffee cup still sits on the table in this room, next to the microwave my dad stole from me. A message for Jeremy hangs on the wall next to me, right under the New York Employment Rights Act poster.  A calender sits still at October 2005.  Across the room from me hangs a white out board, listing phone numbers for Guy, Phil, Kathy, me, and BoneHead(Jeremy, apparently).  Neither Guy or I have worked here in a year and a half, but our imprints remain.  Under my number is written Sara’s number. You know you miss her.   A Mountain Dew bottle still sits on Dave’s desk, though I think it was Phil’s.  The ping-pong wooden gun lies on Phil’s old desk, and, I suspect, if I were to go into the other room, to my old desk that Kathy now uses, and riffle through it, I would find traces of myself.

So this is what gets left behind.  Coffee cups, wooden toys, and post-it notes.  On a whim, I leap up and head into the other room, rooting through my old desk.  Even though Kathy uses it, there are word documents still on the computer, a stray post-it note, a hair tie, a book I thought I lost, a list I made once.  Things that say, Sara was here once.

I left home that winter angry and searching for myself.  I was running away from a painful situation, one that is still yet unresolved and that keep creeping back into my life in dramatic ways.  Instead of turning around and facing it, I ran away, graciously and kindly, but still and all, running instead of working through it.  Time away was good. Staying away was not. 
It was just fear, I realize. Fear of being known, fear of being surrounded by people who could see right through me.

Fear that made me run, and I have run for one year, seven months, and five days.

The four block walk exhausts me.  It will be weeks before I regain strength.  My doctor even told me that had I not come in when I did, that my oxygen levels were so low, that any physical exertion last week would have killed me.  My already oxygen-depleted red blood cells would not have been able to survive physical anything last week, and I would have essesntially suffocated myself by something as mere as practicing martial arts with Rebekah,  a revelation that astounds me almost as much as it scares me. 

They’re sitting on couches in the front room, watching the big screen television while sitting on the new leather.  Ladies and gentlemen, your tax dollars at work.

Silence descends as they look up at me. 
It has been nineteen months since I last darkened these doors. And I am simply too tired to have pride left.

I found the application in the bottom drawer of my old desk.  I changed some dates, but the rest is still the same.  We stare at each other for a long moment.  Finally, Patrick stands up and takes the papers from my fingers.

“Sara, I–“

I know what he’s going to say, the same words we’ve said a thousand times, the same thoughts we’ve thought.

I shrug. “I’m not playing this game,” I say quietly, with what I hope is dignity.  “You have no reason not to accept that application from me.”
“Oh, yeah, we do,” Jim says. “Severe anemia, for starters.  The very last thing I need is you collapsing on scene, and then I have to deal with the victim and you.”
And nothing has changed here, either, because it is still a fishbowl.  I wonder who told them, what phone calls have been exchanged, who has sat in what office discussing the fact that Sara’s sick.  And then I realize that I don’t really want to know.

I level my gaze.   “Read the application over,” I reply quietly. “My phone number’s on there.”  I glance back at Patrick.
“I’ll be at Pizza Hut,” I continue, and then glance at the brand new bay door and grin. “Don’t drive there.”

It’s a long walk to Pizza Hut, and it’s a walk I shouldn’t make.  But I know this town, my town, my people, and I know, somehow, instinctively, they need to know I’m here, and I’m staying.  I know, as I walk past these houses, that there are people inside who are watching me walk.

I’m collapsing by the time I get into Pizza Hut. This is home, and there are good memories here. Those were happy days.

The waitress, like everyone else, knows me. She hands me my Diet.
“Just one?”
I glance up at the door, and in walks Patrick. He doesn’t walk as slow as I do these days.
“Two.” He says, and slips into the booth seat across from me. I can barely hide a grin, and he matches it.

“What made you do that?” he asks.

I shrug. “I was at the office.  Started noticing all the things left behind, and suddenly started wondering if all I had left was a book and a word document and a hair tie.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m more than that.  I ran away so fast nineteen months ago that I left only physical things behind.  But what about laughter? And hope? And joy?  I didn’t leave that behind, Patrick.  When you walk into that office, do you think of the laughter I left behind, the good memories, or just the books on the table?”
“So you’ve come back.”
“You knew I would.”

He laughs. “You know, you really had Jimmy going with that application.  You know he’d have to deny it.”
I laugh, too. “He must think I’m an idiot if I’d really go back now.”
Patrick shakes his head and smiles warmly. I smile back.
He slides the application back at me, and I glance at the date at the top.

June 01, 2006.

“Come on,” he says, “I’ll drive you back to the office.  You shouldn’t be walking, you should be sleeping.”
“I should be doing homework,” I say.

“Well, then,” he says. “Let’s go.”
And we do.